1Gb Single or 512 mb Dual Channel ?!?

[nesso]

Hi guys...
im buying a new pc and i really want to know which is better...

i´m gonna buy a E6600 Core 2 Duo and 1 Gb DDR2
and i want to know .. which option is better ??

1 - 1 Gb Single DDR 2 RAM
2 - 512 MB Dual Channel

other question ... 667 Mhz is too slower then 800 Mhz Clocks ?? For the E6600 CPU ?

thx
[]´s

 

[Valtiel]

well the dual channel set would be better in general as it would provide more memory bandwidth.

other question ... 667 Mhz is too slower then 800 Mhz Clocks ?? For the E6600 CPU ?

I have no clue what you meant here can you please clarify.

 

[choirbass]

having dual channel will mainly only be useful in benchmarks, TBH (offering only a marginal boost in performance for daily use)... ...as far as memory speed, DDR2 667 will work just fine with that cpu (at stock speed for sure)... if you plan on overclocking the E6600 by much though, it *may* be more beneficial to get DDR2 800 instead

 

[nesso]

what gets a better performance in gamming ??

if u guys have a benchmarch i will apreciate ...

 

[choirbass]

what gets a better performance in gamming ??

if u guys have a benchmarch i will apreciate ...

truthfully, you cant go wrong by going with dual channel, its not like it will make your system slower in itself... though there are a few cons against it... it takes up a minimum of 2 dimm slots on your motherboard, and they always have to be even amounts of dimm modules... potentially lessening the total amount of memory you would be able to have installed in your system, which is never a good thing (4x1GB compared to 4x512, etc)... you dont want to be relying on your hdd for virtual memory, because windows ran out of available system memory, which ends up slowing your performance waay down as a result

benchmarks shouldnt be too difficult to find if you google for them... ...when it comes to gaming performance (which is what youre asking about), the gpu is what either makes or breaks decent gaming performance (most every other component in your system is fairly negligable as far as gaming performance impact), and the gpu is more often the bottleneck than anything when you start increasing details and resolutions... so dual channel will not help there (wont increase gpu speed, etc)

i would definetly be more concerned with total system memory amount, than the actual speed and bandwidth of the memory, when it comes to a resource hungry application, such as most current games

 

[chocobocorey]

you cant tell between 667 and 800 Mhz unless you run benchmarks

how bout pc2 4200 (533)? would that make any significant drop or not either

 

[chocobocorey]

yeah. so i guess my ddr2 533 is pretty much worthless then, cause i was planning on gettin a low end core 2 and getting it to 2.5-3 ghz